Volume 14 · Issue 4

Spring 1981

BLAKE AND THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MIND

NELSONHILTON

While the Romantics looked to nature’s mountains in the form of Mont
Blanc, the Jungfrau, or Skiddaw to find a visible externalization of their
psychology,1↤ 1 On the development of this trend, see
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, The Norton Library
(1959, rpt.; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963). We may note here that
“mountains” do, in fact, appear more frequently in Blake’s
imagery (161 times in the poetry) than in Wordsworth’s or
Shelley’s. This is, to be sure, hardly true of mount/mountain imagery
at large; one finds at once that Blake uses no adjectival combinations such
as “mountain gloom” or “glory.” But the
“mountains” themselves are more numerous, and more strange.
Blake’s mountains
reflect an interior vision of the mountains of mythology and those, not far
distant, of the Bible. These befit a poet who saw his visions in the worlds of
thought and, from all accounts, never saw a genuine mountain (much less a Welsh
one) in his life. Mircea Eliade summarizes the mythological dimension:
↤ 2 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in
Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sneed, Meridian Books
(New York: World Publishing, 1963), p. 199.

Mountains are the nearest thing to the sky, and are thence endowed with a
twofold holiness: on the one hand they share in the spatial symbolism of
transcendence—they are ‘high,’
‘vertical,’ ‘supreme,’ and so on—and on
the other, they are the especial domain of all hierophanies of atmosphere,
and therefore, the dwelling of the gods.2

Their symbolic and religious significance, he continues, “is
endless.” One can see the sacred quality stemming from the fact that
mountains penetrate the upper, pure regions of the atmosphere (aether) carried
on in seventeenth-century poetic diction, where standard non-negative epithets
are “cloud-touching, star-brushing.”3↤ 3 Joshua Poole, English Parnassus;
or, A Help to English Poesie, cited in Nicolson, p. 35. Such
epithets show how mountains become quintessentially “sublime” or
sublimen, just “below the threshold” (of
heaven). For the ancient Greeks the upper air, source of meteors and other
meteorological events, was integrally related to mountains and “high
ground”—ta meteora; their conjunction offers
“a spot where one can pass from one cosmic zone to another” (Eliade,
p. 100). Blake writes of the “Atlantean hills” that “from their
bright summits you may pass to the Golden world” (Am
10.6, 7).4↤ 4 References to Blake are from E: The Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, 3rd
ed. w/rev. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968). Cf. FZ,
II, 32.8ff., E 315: “a Golden World whose porches round the heavens /
And pillard hall & rooms receivd the eternal wandering
stars.” The
dwelling of Zeus—Dios,
God of the Bright Sky—was Mount Olympus, but “olympus” was to
be found all over mountainous Greece; the word itself is the pre-Greek term for
“mountain.” The Romans, though lacking mountains, nonetheless
dignified “their own poor little Capitol . . . with the title of
‘Mons’”5↤ 5 Wilfrid Noyce, Scholar
Mountaineers, Pioneers of Parnassus (London: Dennis Dobson, 1950),
p. 11.
and the
cosmological zone of the female body receives the same dignity.6↤ 6 Cf. Shakespeare, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, V.i.75-77; Ahania urges Urizen in a Blakean
double-entendre “To arise to the mountain sport, / To the bliss of
eternal valleys” (BA 5.7-8). Mountains also represent
the woman’s bosom; see in particular Blake’s illustration no.
4 to Milton’s L’Allegro, “The Sunshine
Holiday.”

In Mesopotamia, “temples were called the ‘mountain house,’ the
‘house of the mountain of all lands,’ the ‘mountain of
storms,’ the ‘bound between sky and earth,’ and so
on.”7↤ 7 Eliade, Patterns, p. 376;
cf. Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion: An
Introductory Study (London: SCM Press, 1970), p. 153. According to
Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old
Testament, Harvard Semitic Monographs, vol. IV (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), “ . . . many modern scholars seem
disinclined to use the concept of the Weltberg to describe
Mesopotamian speculation about the cosmic center. Nonetheless, there is a
cosmic center, where heaven and earth are united. The cosmic center appears
in some texts to be commemorated[e] by a shrine or temple”
(p. 25). The
association of meteora, high things, and centering, is again expressed in the
widespread belief of various cultures that their mountain lies directly under
the pole star, and so presents the Axis Mundi. In the Old
Testament one of the names of God, El-Shaddai, can be
translated as “the God of the Mountain, the God of the
‘Height’ or (as the highest) an astral god,”8↤ 8 Ad de Vries, A Dictionary of
Imagery and Symbolism (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1974),
s.v. “mountain.” and in the historical period of Israel, “mountain
house” became a common name for “temple.”9↤ 9 W. Foerster in Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of
the New Testament, trans.
Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. V, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1968),
s.v. “to oros.”

The closeness of God and the mountain is typified by the theophanies at Sinai. As
houses of God, they are also places of sacrifice, high—Latin
alta—altars; in Genesis 22:2 God tells Abraham to offer his
son “for[e] a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I
will tell thee
of.” So Los takes Orc “to the top of a mountain” (BU 20.21) to
chain him down. The New Testament made great use of the
Old Testament symbolism, and its repeated description of Jesus’ going eis
to oros, “up the mountain” or “into the
mountains,” assumes a formulaic dimension.10↤ 10 Cf. Mt. 5:1, 14:23, 15:29; Mk. 3:13, 6:46; Lk.
6:12, 9:28; Jn. 6:3, 6:15. Thomas Fawcett nicely summarizes this
important theme:
In addition to being antitypical, many events in
Christ’s life are associated with the cosmic mountain. The
one in fact inevitably brought in the other by association. When
Jesus is made in Matthew’s gospel to give his new law from
the mount, there is both a fulfilment of the Sinai revelation in
view, and underlying this, the symbolism of the mountain as the
place of God’s disclosure to men. The motif appears on
several occasions. The narrative opens with a story of temptation in
which Christ formulates his message in confrontation with the Devil
and in reliance on the word of God, appropriately located on a
mountain. The moment of disclosure to the disciples of Jesus’
nature and mission takes place on the mount of Transfiguration. At
the summit of the mountain they see him converse with the saints of
the past. His crucifixion was later held to have taken place upon a
hill, and Calvary became the focal mountain for much Christian
theology, because at this moment above all it came to be held that
God had revealed himself to man. Finally the ascension is said to
have taken place on the mount of Olives in such a way that the
symbolism of the summit as the point of meeting between man and God
is clearly shown. His ascension from this point implies a summit in
which the two worlds of mythology are joined.
(Symbolic Language, p. 227)
Little wonder that Blake should characterize the two Testaments by
their respective dominant mountains:

Such is the Divine Written Law of Horeb
& Sinai:
And such the Holy Gospel of Mount Olivet &
Calvary
(J 16.68-69)

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One mountain, however, serves to site and anchor both
Testaments: Mount Zion, “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole
earth” (Ps. 48:2), “the holy Mountain” (Zech. 8:3) of the Lord
and synonymous with its city, Jerusalem. So Paul reminds the Hebrews, “But
ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem” (12:22). Tiny Mount Zion is to “tower over the other
mountains” (Clifford, p. 157; cf. Is. 2:4, Mic. 4:1).

As Jerusalem is to Mount Zion, so she was and will be to Albion; which is to say
that Albion is—or rather, was and will be—a holy mountain.
Holinshed, who begins his Chronicles discussing the legend of
the ancient denomination of England, refers to speculation “whether
Britaine was called Albion of the word Alb, white, or Alp an hill.”11↤ 11
Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 6 vol.
(London: J. Johnson et al., 1807-1808), I, 6. The name in fact is connected with the
root of Latin Alpis, Gaelic alp, and Irish
ailp, meaning mountain. Blake plays on this assonance and
etymological connection, imagining that Los’s “voice is heard from
Albion: the Alps & Appenines / Listen” (J 85.16-17).
As only high mountains tend to be white (with snow), the traditional association
of Albion with albus could also be seen to suggest that Albion
was once a high mountain, now islanded by the sea. This could be confirmed by
Albion’s white cliffs, a word Blake generally uses in its less common
sense of “a steep slope, a hill.” The cliffs are the sides of
Albion’s great mountain as it slips down below the surface of the sea:
“ . . . Albion the White Cliff of the Atlantic / The Mountain of Giants . . . ”
(J 49.6-7).

Mountains are necessarily related to the image of the ocean deluge. Thomas
Burnet’s mytho-poetic Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681)
argued that the weight of the floodwaters broke the crust of the paradisal
“mundane egg” into mountains.12↤ 12 Cf. Thomas Burnet, The Sacred
Theory of the Earth, intro. Basil Willey, Centaur Classics
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), Bk. K, ch. 5, p.
63. In
a somewhat similar manner, when Eternity rolls apart in The Book of
Urizen what is left is “mountainous all around,” dominated by
“ruinous fragments of life / Hanging frowning cliffs & all between /
An ocean of voidness unfathomable” (5.7, 9-11). Earlier cosmologies also
focused on the creation of “land” out of Chaos (if not
Eternity)—the deep, the Semitic Tehom. These traditions
imagined that the mountains were placed in Tehom to serve as
foundations of the world—they were the first dry land, like Mount Ararat
after the later flood. According to some rabbinical similes, “God’s
mountains reach down to the great Tehom” and “these mountains dominate
Tehom, lest it should rise and innundate the earth.”13↤ 13 A. J. Wensinck, The Ideas of
the Western Semites Concerning The Navel of the Earth;
Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam,
Adeeling Le Herkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel XVII, no. 1 (Amsterdam: Johannes
Müller, 1916), p. 2. As foundations, the mountains are seen as the
“pillars of heaven” (Job 26:11, cf. 9:6). So in Albion/Jerusalem,

Pancrass & Kentish-town repose
Among her golden pillars high:
Among her golden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
(J 27.9-12)

The cosmological scope of this reference
is clear remembering that the “pillard hall & arched roof of Albions
skies” receive “the eternal wandering stars” (FZ, II, 25.16, 32.9;
E 310, 315).14↤ 14 Cf. Kittle, ed., Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament, s.v. stulos,
“pillar”: “The word stulos has cosmological
significance in some hymnal passages in the OT. . . . The primary thought
here is that the earth is a house which God has built” (vol. VII, p.
733). The mountains are the pillars of that house. Compare Christopher
Smart’s use of the image: “For he [God] hath fixed the earth
upon arches & pillars, and the flames of hell flow under it.”
(Jubilate Agno, ed. W. H. Bond [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1954], p. 67). Since the flood
represented the victory of Chaos, of Leviathan,
some rabbinical commentators held that the land of Israel was not submerged by
the Deluge, a belief which is paralleled in Islam. A. J. Wensinck comments:

Why the Sanctuary is not attained by the waters of the Deluge is clear:
Deluge is the reign of Tehom, of old a demonic power, familiar from the
creation stories. The Sanctuary is the type and representation of Kosmos and
of Paradise and as such a power diametrically opposed to Chaos; when the
Semites maintain that the Sanctuary was not reached by the Deluge, this is
not only due to the opinion that the Sanctuary is the highest place in the
world, but also to the conviction that Chaos cannot gain a complete victory
over Kosmos, for behind the latter is the creative power of the supreme
being.
(pp. 15-16)

This conception offers several analogies to Blake’s images, from that of
the one sense through which man may “himself pass out” (Eur iii.5)
which remained after the other senses “whelm’d
in deluge” (Eur 10.10-11) over him, to the picture of
Albion as the mountain remaining when “the Atlantic Continent sunk round
Albions Cliffy shore / And the Sea pourd in amain” (J
32[36].40-41). The “sea of Time & Space” is the principal deluge.
This may account for the frequent graphic depiction of an action taking place on
a location surrounded by water; it is an image of England, but it signifies also
imaginative vision, not yet drowned in Time and Space (or Realism or
Naturalism). So when Reuben sleeps “like one dead in the
valley”—the vale, or low-lying, submersible land—the notable
thing is that he is thus “Cut off from Albions mountains & from all
the Earths summits” (J 30[34].43,44). “Wild seas
& Rocks” are to “close up Jerusalem away from / The Atlantic
Mountains[e]” (J 49.77-50.1). America tells
that

On those vast shady hills between America & Albions shore;
Now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea: call’d Atlantean hills
Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world
An ancient palace, archetype of mighty Emperies,
Rears its immortal pinnacles. . . .
(10.5-9)

One critic has called this
passage “iconic” and remarked its “tantalizing quality of
meanings nearly communicated yet withheld.”15↤ 15 Vincent A. De Luca, “Ariston’s
Immortal Palace: Icon and Allegory in Blake’s Prophecies,”
Criticism, 12 (Winter 1970), 5-6. For a recent and
suggestive reading, critical of the implications of the
“archetype,” see Deborah Dorfman, “‘King of
Beauty’ and ‘Golden World’ in Blake’s America: The Reader
and the Archetype,” ELH, 46 (Spring 1979), 122-35. Without entering the context of America or the
“suitability of invoking the myth of a lost, paradisal Atlantis as a symbol
of transcendent unity,”16↤ 16 De Luca, p. 6; note that nowhere in his work
does Blake ever specifically mention Atlantis. I would
simply emphasize that the mythic structure of the mountain sanctuary, temple,
palace is itself a “meaning communicated.” The reader is told
something about the situation, appearance, and function of the summit-structure
and it takes its place among Blake’s visionary locales—the
description engages our attention by calling up latent (and several times
removed) mythological associations. The Atlantic, one should remember, is named
not for Atlantis, but for the Titan Atlas, seen in classical times as Mount
Atlas, the pillar of heaven. Atlas, Blake believed, was the Greek name for
Albion, “Patriarch of the Atlantic”
(DC, E 534; italics added). Blake viewed
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his Hesperian situation quite personally, as evident in the
dedicatory poem to The Grave, which says that
his “designs unchangd remain”:

For above Times troubled Fountains
On the Great Atlantic Mountains
In my Golden House on high
There they Shine Eternally

(“The Caverns of the Grave,” 17-20)

These
mountains rise out of the sea of time becoming the “infinite” and
“eternal” mountains, the site of paradise: “the Garden of Eden .
. . the golden mountains” (J 28.2), “the mountain
palaces of Eden” (J 41[46].3-4).

The setting of Abraham’s sacrifice and Jesus’ crucifixion leads to
the very different image of Albion “slain upon his Mountains / And in his
Tent,”

a formula which occurs three times (M 3.1-2; 19.20;
J 59.16). The Tent is the Sky (M 29.4),
and the plural mountains reach back to the common mythological idea of a central
tent-pole, axle-tree mountain, and four smaller poles making a square around it
(the sort depicted, in cross-section, dropping around plates 1 and 21 of
Job). The image also evokes “mountainous Wales,”
where Albion’s ancient inhabitants fled originally to escape the Saxons,
there finally to be conquered by Norman Edward I, who, as retold by Gray, put to
death “all the Bards that fell into his hands”—the poetic being
of Albion.17↤ 17 According to Mallet, however, “the
ancient inhabitants of Britain have been dispossessed by the Saxons of the
greatest and most pleasant part of their island, and constrained to conceal
themselves among the mountains in Wales, where, to this day, they retain
their language, and preserve some traces of their ancient manners;”
Northern Antiquities, trans. (London, 1770), I,
70.

But from all indications, something happened earlier, something which
“separated the stars from the mountains: the mountains from Man” (J
17.31). Somewhere in the Druid past, Albion changed
“From willing sacrifice of self, to sacrifice of (miscall’d) Enemies
/ For Atonement,” an action, like Abraham’s, located on the
mountains. Albion concludes his opening speech in Jerusalem
saying:

By demonstration man alone can live, and not by faith.
My
mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself:
The Malvern and
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Are mine. here will I build my
Laws of Moral Virtue!
Humanity shall be no more: but war &
princedom & victory!
(J 4.28-32, my italics)

In less than ten lines, “Albions mountains run with blood, the cries
of war & of tumult” (J 5.6). These sacrifices in
turn react on their sites as
↤ 18 The mountains shrinking “like a
withering gourd” suggests God’s action on the gourd tree
sheltering Jonah; He “prepared a worm . . . and it smote the gourd
that it withered” (Jonah 4:7). One may think also of the comparison
of the earth to an apple, withering into mountainous ridges.

. . all the mountains and hills shrink up like
a withering gourd
As the Senses of Men shrink together under the Knife
of flint
In the hands of Albions Daughters, among the Druid
Temples
(J 66.82-84)18

Other of
Albion’s fallen mountains are listed in another catalogue:
“ . . . the Peak, Malvern & Cheviot Reason in Cruelty / Penmaenmawr
& Dhinas-bran Demonstrate in Unbelief” (J 21.34-35).
The single appearance of “Dhinas-bran” may refer to “Dîn
Brëon, the Hill of Legislature,” which “was
the sacred mount, where . . . the ancient judges of the land, assembled, to
decide causes.”19↤ 19 Davies, Myth and Rites of the
British Druids (London, 1809), p. 6. Damon suggests the obscure
“Dinas Bran,” a hill in north Wales topped by the ruins of an
ancient camp. Unconvinced himself, he adds, “Blake might really have
had in mind Dinas Penmaen, and ancient British fort which could hold twenty
thousand men. It was on the summit of Mount Penmaenmawr” (A Blake
Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, rpt.
[New York: Dutton, 1971], p. 103; cf. J 18.38 where Hand
and Hyle are “Building Castles in desolated places, and strong
Fortifications”). One argument against “Dhinas-Bran” as a
“camp” is that all the others are specific mountains or mountain
ranges; but this remains unsatisfying at best.

Blake was evidently impressed by the description in Ezekiel of the sacrificial
feast the Lord is to

make of his enemies; all the beasts are invited to the “great
sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink
blood;” there “ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till
ye be drunken” (29:17, 19). In “the Song” sung at “The Feast
of Los and Enitharoom” Blake transfers the action to the mountains
themselves—which begin to emerge as solidified giant forms with Biblical
histories:

Clifford notes the suggestion
that “the feast on the mountain of the bodies of the enemy is a
transformation of the exchatological picture of the ‘joyous
feast’” as in Isaiah 25:6-8. “Possibly,” he concludes,
“the banquet for the victorious on the mountain and the slaughter-sacrifice
of the enemies are one and the same” (pp. 176-77). This duality seems
applicable to the Wedding Feast of Los and Enitharmon, since they begin, with
Urizen, “Rejoicing
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in the Victory” (12.35,
E 303, cf. J 4.32 above). Blake’s intertwining vision
of the Fall on the mountains of Israel and England follows from his conception
of Druid practices and from hints in the Old Testament—unified in an
image of “moral” sacrifice on mountains (classical mountains, ora,
become moral emblems). His first use of
the negative power of Old Testament mountains is the figure and setting of
“har,” the Hebrew for “mountain,” in particular, “the
mountain” (hā-hār) where Moses received the
Law (cf. Clifford, p. 107ff.); as Blake would have read in Bryant: “Har and
Hor signify a mountain; ὄρος [oros] of the Greeks.”20↤ 20 Jacob Bryant,
A New System or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology,
etc., vol. I (London, 1774), p. 94. The Greek root appears in the word
“orology,” which the OED cites from 1781 as
“the science of mountains.” So Tiriel first enters “the pleasant
gardens of Har” (Tir 2.10)—reminiscent of
“Eden the garden of God” located on “the holy mountain of
God” (Ez. 28:13-14)—and on his return, “the mountains of
Har” (7.19).21↤ 21 Harold Bloom remarks, “As Har means
‘mountain’ in Hebrew, the very phrase ‘vales of
Har’ is an irony” [?] (E 863); Damon interprets the name and
situation of Har as, “He who was a mountain now lives in a vale, cut
off from mankind” (Blake Dictionary, p.
174).The French Revolution imagines “the old mountains . . .
like aged men, fading away” (9) which aptly suits “aged Har” (Tir
8.6).

The Book of Joshua offers the Druid-like image of the Israelites setting up
“a great stone . . . under an oak . . . by the sanctuary of the LORD”
(25.26) at Shechem, which lies between Mount Gerizim, appointed by the Lord for
a blessing, and Mount Ebal, appointed for a curse. Here, in the natural
amphitheater of the two mountainsides, Joshua divided the tribes of Israel
according to the words of Moses, and while one hears little of blessing, twelve
shouted verses beginning “Cursed be . . . ” (Jos. 27:11ff.) further
illustrate the nature of “barren mountains of Moral Virtue” (J
45[31].19-20; cf. 4.31, above). Jerusalem laments: “The
mountain of blessing is itself a curse & an astonishment: / The hills of
Judea are fallen with me into the deepest hell” (J
79.7-8). A passage repeated in The Four Zoas and
Jerusalem shows Tirzah binding down the Human Form crying:

The “Stems of Vegetation,” a
revision of The Four Zoas’ introduction to this passage
reveals, are the “stones” of the mountain altar: “binding on the
Stones [stems del.] / Their victims & with knives
tormenting them” (105.28-29 and E 759). “Druid” monuments tend to
be associated with Salisbury Plain, but describing his picture “The Ancient
Britons,” Blake wrote, “Distant among the mountains, are Druid
Temples, similar to Stone Henge” (DC, E 536). Blake was
following good authority. Borlase’s Antiquities . . . of
Cornwall, for example, observed of the Druids that, “It was a
general custom to chuse for their places of worship woods which stood on the
tops of hills, and mountains, as more becoming the dignity and sublime offices
of their devotions, and of nearer neighbourhood (as they imagined) to the
habitations of their Gods.”22↤ 22 William Borlase, Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of
the County of Cornwall.
Consisting of Several Essays on the First Inhabitants,
Druid-Superstition, Customs, and Remains of the most Remote
Antiquity etc., 2nd ed. (London, 1769), p. 116. The practice
was not confined to England; John Toland believed that “Abundance
of such heaps remain still on the mountains in France, and on the
Alps;” A Critical History of the Celtic Religion
etc. (London, n.d. [1740?]), p. 102. The cross-cultural associations can
extend even further. In his Ode to Superstition
(1786), Samuel Rogers writes:
On yon hoar summit, mildly bright
With purple ether’s liquid light
High o’er the
world, the white-rob’d Magi gaze
On dazzling bursts of
heav’nly fire. . . .
(II.3)
A note adds:
“‘The Persians,’ says Herodotus, ‘reject the
use of temples, altars, and statues. The tops of the highest mountains
are the places chosen for sacrifices’” (The
Pleasures of Memory with other Poems, new & enlarged ed.
[London, 1799], p. 118).
Borlase
remarks the Old Testament parallels and describes “Karnbrê-hill,
which has all the evidences that can be desired of having been appropriated to
the use of the British Religion;” these are “rock-basons, circles,
stones erect, remains of Cromlêh’s, Karns, a grove of Oaks, a
cave, and an enclosure” (pp. 116, 120). Thomas Pennant, in his Journey to
Snowden (London, 1781), writes that his fellow-traveller
climbed a local hill “on whose summit was a circular coronet of rude
peppley stones . . . with an entrance to the east, or rising sun” (p.
63).23↤ 23 The imaginative power which increasingly
associated mountain-tops and Druids is exemplified by a
mid-nineteenth-century climber’s description of the top of
“Glyder Fach”: “The scene before us, in fact, resembled the
ruins of some vast Druidical temple—a mountain
Stonehenge—which has been overthrown ages ago by some awful
convulsion of nature. Indeed, so strong was our impression that we were in
the midst of venerable Druidical remains, that it was some time ere we could
convince ourselves that what we saw was in reality a chaotic mass of stones
thrown into inconceivable convulsion” (John H. Cliffe, quoted in Edward
C. Pyatt, Mountains of Britain [London: B. T. Batsford,
1966], p. 67).

Jerusalem shows “the Divine Vision like a Silent Sun”

. . . setting behind the Gardens of Kensington
On Tyburns River, in
clouds of blood, where was mild Zion Hills
Most ancient promontory, and
in the Sun, a Human Form appeared
(43[29].2-4)

. . . near Tyburns fatal Tree? is
that
Mild Zion hills most ancient promontory; near mournful
Ever
weeping Paddington? is that Calvary and Golgotha?
(12.26-28)24

This is glossed by
27.25ff where “ever-weeping Paddington” is
identified as “that mighty Ruin / Where Satan the first
victory won” (my italics), where also “the Druids” made
“Offerings of Human Life.” The general reference is to Tyburn,
London’s place of public hangings from as early as 1196 until 1783. By
the time they were discontinued, Blake was twenty-six and undoubtedly all too
aware of the eager crowds that appeared for each of the eight public
hanging-days—indeed, tradition made these public holidays for all
journeymen.25↤ 25 George Rudé,
Hanoverian London, 1714-1808, The History of London
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p.
94.
A “Paddington
Fair” was a public execution, so called because Tyburn was less than a mile
from the village of Paddington,26↤ 26 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. A Dictionary of
Buckish
Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence, fore. Robert
Cromie, rpt. from 1811 original (Chicago: Follett Publishing, n.d. [?1971]),
s.v. in whose
parish it was eventually included. There is a visionary continuity joining the
Druid monuments, Calvary, and Tyburn: Druid human sacrifices “generally
consisted of such criminals as were convicted of theft, or any capital
crime” (Borlase, p. 121) and Calvary—as the crucifixion of two
thieves with Jesus suggests—was, like Tyburn, a site for the execution of
common criminals.

I am suggesting that the passage from plate 12 of Jerusalem
quoted above answers itself: Mild Zion hills most ancient promontory is
Tyburn’s fatal Tree (“that” of 1.26). Not
because it had particular elevation (it is a mountain of the mind, a mounting of
the scaffold), but because it possessed all the attributes of Calvary,
succinctly re-summarized by Richard Cumberland in his long poem, Calvary; or
the Death of Christ (London, 1792): “Without the city
wall there was a mount / Call’d
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CALVARY: The
common grave it was / Of malefactors” (VI. 440-42). According to one
authority the Tyburn gallows was in fact situated “on a small eminence at
the corner of Edgeware-Road,”27↤ 27 John Timbs,
Curiosities of London, A New Edition (London, 1867),
p. 809. which
road, together with Park Lane was as late as 1806 the western limit of
London’s urbanization and the location of one of its “gates,”
the Tyburn Turnpike.28↤ 28 See, for example, the map accompanying B.
Lambert, The History and Survey of London and Its Environs
(London, 1806), vol. IV. Lucas van
Leyden’s engraving of Calvary shows just how small an
eminence can make a mount, or promontory (illus. 1), and Sterne probably
reflects the general conception when he has Tristram remark that an altar over
sixty feet high would have “been as high as mount Calvary
itself” (Tristram Shandy, VII, 5). Blake described his
residence at South Molton Street—just blocks down Oxford Street from the
old gallows—as located on “Calvarys foot / Where the Victims were
preparing for Sacrifice” (M 4.21-22). Significant also
was the very instrument of execution. Tyburn Tree was not a gibbet; rather,
“The scaffold consisted of three posts, ten or twelve feet high, held apart
by three connecting cross-bars at the top.”29↤ 29 Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot
Against the Surgeons,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree:
Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, Douglas Hay, Peter
Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon
Books/Random House, 1975), pp. 65-117, p. 66. The structure is visible, for
example, in Hogarth’s print, The Idle ’Prentice
Executed at Tyburn, Industry and Idleness, XI (illus.
2)—complete with a Calvary-like crowd of spectators. Timbs reports
that “The gallows subsequently consisted of two uprights and a
cross-beam” (p. 809)—an equally Druidic, if less impressive,
structure. It was, in effect, a ruined version of a Druidic temple made of
trilithons—one of the far-fetched hypotheses about

Stonehenge was that it had served as a monumental gallows. In Jerusalem, plate 80,
Vala attempts to “weave Jerusalem a
body” or “A Dragon form on Zion Hills most ancient promontory”:
the “form” is that of the Druidic “Dragon Temples” (J 25.4,
47.6).

These motifs are illustrated at the bottom of Milton, plate 4
(illus. 3); there a rock-skull emerges from the ground, overshadowed by three
trilithons on a mount, reminiscent of the three crosses on Calvary (note
Blake’s reference to Calvary on the same plate, quoted above), while on
the right the three seem to have joined into a threefold trilithon which
suggests a Druid form of the Tyburn gallows.30↤ 30 Cf.
Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, Anchor Books (Garden City,
N. Y.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 220. One might note also how directly above this structure a spindle or
body hangs on high from the end of the line held by one of Blake’s
spinner-Goddesses. The rock-skull identifies this scene as Calvary or Golgotha,
“which is, being interpreted, the place of a skull” (Mk. 15:22, inter
al.). This theme is further developed in Jerusalem, plate 28,
where Albion “sat by Tyburns brook, and underneath his heel shot up! / A
deadly Tree, he nam’d it Moral Virtue” (14-15)—the
“Tree” here joins the cross, Tyburn Tree (cf. OED,
s.v. “tree,” B. 4a,b), and the Tree of Good and Evil, complete with a
Serpentine form at its base.31↤ 31 Erdman astutely observes that “To
correspond to the serpent in the Garden of Eden the typography of Hyde Park
supplies the Serpentine River, which Blake in his deviousness never refers
to by its own name . . . ” (Blake: Prophet Against
Empire, rev. ed. [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969], p. 465);
one antiquary notes that the fatal tree was “opposite the head of the
Serpentine . . . itself being formed in the bed of the ancient stream, first
called Tybourn . . . ” (Timbs, p. 809). Tyburn, then,
is Zion Hills promontory, “most ancient” because all things begin in
Albion and this is “‘the most ancient promontory’ of
sacrifice” (Erdman, Prophet, p. 475), “the summit of
the cosmic mountain and at the same time the place where Adam had been created
and buried. Thus the blood of the Saviour falls upon Adam’s skull, buried
precisely at the foot of the Cross, and redeems him”32↤ 32 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and
History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask,
Harper Torchbooks, Bollingen Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p.
14; see also, George Every, Christian Mythology (London:
Hamlyn Publishing, 1970), “The place of the skull,” pp. 51ff.
Erdman writes (following Timbs), “It was recalled that after the
Restoration the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw had been
disinterred, hanged, and beheaded, and then reburied [under Tyburn
gallows]—another denial of the Resurrection” (Prophet, p.
474). (illus. 4). The use of the word “promontory,”
as Tolley notes, is singular—it serves perhaps to bring in several
associations. The promontory is a visionary scene (like the
Atlantic mountains of America), a “head-land”
offering a vista on the Sea of Time and Space (cf. 3 Henry VI,
III. ii. 134-36); it is the sterile earth to which Hamlet equates it (II. ii.
311); and finally, it is the covering of the fallen mind: in Paradise
Lost the angelic host defeats the rebels and “on their[e]
heads / Main Promontories flung” (6.653-54; cf. J. 71.55
cited below). Ultimately the most ancient promontory is the reader’s
skull (Golgotha/Golgonooza), “Once open to the heavens and elevated on the
human neck” (Eur 10.28), but now imagining and enclosing
all these mountains of and in the mind.

Los, who is himself an ancient Briton, reaches back to the unfallen state of the
mountain imagery, praying “O Divine Saviour arise / Upon the Mountains of
Albion as in ancient time”[e]
(J 44[30].21-22). This image,
together with the evocation of “those feet in ancient time / . . . upon
Englands mountains green” (M 1), recalls the
twice-repeated Biblical praise, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the
feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace” (Is. 52:7,
Nah. 1:15). Considering the plate geology of relief etching, one could say that
Blake’s message also is published on the mountains. The finale of
Jerusalem presents a vision of “the Sun in heavy clouds /
Struggling[e] to rise above the Mountains” (95.11-12): a struggle, perhaps,
because mountains are the “risings” of the earth, the objects of
increasing Romantic adoration. begin page 202 |
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4 Albrecht Dürer, “Crucifixion,” from the Small Passion (1509-11; 127 × 97
mm.).
Courtesy of the British Museum.

begin page 203 |
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That Sun will rise over different mountains, the
natural ones being removed and cast into the sea by faith and “firm
perswasion” in imagination (MHH 12; cf. Mt. 21:21). Once

Jerusalem coverd the Atlantic Mountains & the Erythrean,
From
bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England.
Mount Zion
lifted his head in every Nation under heaven:
And the Mount of Olives
was beheld over the whole Earth
(J 24.46-49)

and
though at present “Jerusalem lies in ruins: / Above the Mountains of
Albion, above the head of Los” (J 71.54-55), in the words
of Isaiah, “it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of
the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and
shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it”
(2:2).

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